Dorianne Laux is the author of five books of poetry, mostrecently The Book of Men. Her fourth book of poems, Facts

about the Moon, is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award andwas short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is alsoauthor of Awake, What We Carry (finalist for the National BookCritic’s Circle Award), and Smoke. She’s the recipient of two BestAmerican Poetry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from theNational Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Jamal Mohamed has presented percussion workshops at venuesworldwide and has performed with Sting, Mark O’Connor,

Giovanni Hidalgo and many other well known artists. In addition,his music has been featured in the television documentaries“Ramses the Great,” National Geographic’s “Lions of Darkness”(with D’Drum), and the film biography of bluesman RobertJohnson, “Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl?” Currently, Mohamedperforms with the percussion group D’Drum (named the 2010winner of Drum! magazine’s award for best percussion group), withthe world music group Brahma, and the jazz ensemble Jampact.He teaches percussion on the faculty at Southern MethodistUniversity.

Cori Pepelnjak’s propensity for dissolving boundaries, situationalimmersion, and cultivating relationships not only preceded her

use of the camera, but was the catalyst that compelled her pursuitof photography. An astute observer who approaches situationsand subjects with a level of guilelessness and compassion, sheelicits strong emotional responses and encourages viewers toreflect on their values and relationships. Primarily self-taught, CoriPepelnjak received the 2009 CENTER Project Competition Awardand a generous Minnesota State Arts Grant in 2010. She currently isworking on several long-term projects, including “JoJo” and “Bythe Week.”

Greta Pratt is the author of two books, Using History, and InSearch of the Corn Queen. Pratt’s works are represented in

major public and private collections, including the SmithsonianAmerican Art Museum, the Museum of ContemporaryPhotography and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Pratt wasnominated for a Pulitzer Prize and worked as photography bureauchief of Reuters International in New York City. Her photographshave been featured in The New York Times Magazine and TheNew Yorker. Pratt is currently an assistant professor of photographyat Old Dominion.

Alice Randall is the author of The Wind Done Gone, Pushkin andthe Queen of Spades, Rebel Yell, and Ada’s Rules. Born in

Detroit, she grew up in Washington, D.C. After majoring in Englishat Harvard, she headed south to Music City and foundedMidsummer Music with the idea to create a new way to fundnovel writing and a community of powerful storytellers. In theprocess, she became the first black woman in history to write a

No. 1 country song. Four novels later, the award-winning songwriterwith over 20 recorded songs to her credit and frequent contributorto Elle magazine, is writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt Universitywhere she teaches courses on Country Lyrics in American Culture,Creative Writing, and Soul Food in text and as text.

Sheri Reynolds is the author of the novels Bitterroot Landing, TheRapture of Canaan, A Gracious Plenty, Firefly Cloak, and The

Sweet In-Between. Her most recent novel, The Homespun Wisdomof Myrtle T. Cribb, will be released this fall. Reynolds teachescreative writing and literature classes at Old Dominion Universityand lives in the town of Cape Charles on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Patrick Rosal is the author of Boneshepherds, named one of thebest small-press books of 2011 by the National Book Critics

Circle, My American Kundiman, and Uprock Headspin Scrambleand Dive. He has won, among other honors, a Fulbright Fellowship,the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, and theAsian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award. Hiswriting has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He isan assistant professor of creative writing at Rutgers University-Camden and on the core faculty of Drew University’slow-residency MFA.

Tim Seibles is the author of several books of poems includingHurdy-Gurdy, Hammerlock, and Buffalo Head Solos. His latest

collection, Fast Animal, has just been released. He has beenawarded a fellowship for poetry from the NEA and has been aworkshop leader for the Cave Canem Writers Retreat and for theZora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation. His work has beenfeatured in anthologies such as Black Nature, Seriously Funny, TheNew Guard, and Best American Poetry 2010. He is visiting facultyfor the University of Southern Maine’s low-residential StonecoastMFA Program. Seibles teaches in ODU’s English department andMFA in writing program.

Words withTEETH35th Annual Literary FestivalS e p t . 3 0 – O c t . 5 , 2 0 1 2

Allan Gurganus’s novels, stories and essays include theinternational bestseller Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells

All (1989), which has been translated into 12 languages and soldover 2 million copies. His first published story, “Minor Heroism,”appeared in The New Yorker in 1974, and offered the first gaycharacter that magazine had ever presented. Gurganus is a 2006Guggenheim Fellow. His other published works include acollection of stories and novellas, White People (Los Angeles TimesBook Prize) and the novel Plays Well With Others. His latest book isThe Practical Heart: Four Novellas (Lambda Literary Award).

Yona Harvey is a poet and writer living in PittsburghPennsylvania. When drafting new work, she often samples

non-poetry texts like music reviews, fashion magazines, grammarprimers, and cookbooks. She is the author of the forthcomingpoetry collection, Hemming the Water (2013), and directs theundergraduate Creative Writing Program at Carnegie MellonUniversity.

Yunte Huang is the author of Charlie Chan: The Untold Story ofthe Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American

History (2010), which won the Edgar Award and California BookAward and was also the finalist for the National Book Critics CircleAward. A poet and translator, he has published TranspacificDisplacement (2003), CRIBS (2005), Transpacific Imaginations(2007), and other books. He is currently a professor of English atthe University of California, Santa Barbara.

Karolina Karlic is a Los Angeles-based photographer, born inWroclaw, Poland. Karlic’s work is invested in the

representation of American culture, specifically focusing onlabor, immigration and outsourcing and their causes ofdisplacement in today’s society. In search of the Americandream, her family fled communist Poland in 1986 and her fatherfound work in the U.S. auto industry. Her series “The Dee,” “Closeto Home,” “Dear Diary” and “ELEMENTARZ” have been exhibitednationally. Most recently, her film “This Part of the Legend of aDream” was screened at the REDCAT, Roy and EdnaDisney/CalArts Theater in Los Angeles. In 2011 she was awardeda Guggenheim Fellowship.

Yunghi Kim, a Korean American photojournalist based in NewYork City, has covered some of the biggest global news

events in the last 30 years. These include the Iraq andAfghanistan wars, Hurricane Katrina, the Rwandan Genocideand the war in Kosovo. Kim has been published in Time,Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, LIFE, The Independent(London) and People, among others. Her professional accoladesinclude over 35 Photographer of the Year awards, and runner-upfor the Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of Somalia.

Special thanks to the Dr. Forrest P. White Endowment, the President’s Lecture Series,the Norfolk Arts Commission, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the UniversityVillage Bookstore.

This year’s events are co-sponsored by the ODU College of Arts and Letters, ODUGay Cultural Studies, ODU Out, ODU Women’s Studies Department, ODU Women’sCenter, The Filipino American Center, The Institute for Jewish Studies and InterfaithUnderstanding, the Virginia Beach Higher Education Center, the Patricia W. and J. Douglas Perry Library, and the Friends of the ODU MFA Creative Writing Program.

Join the Friends of the ODU MFA Creative Writing Program:http://odumfafriends.webs.com/. Your investment will fund scholarships andprograms for ODU Creative Writing students and support the literary arts in theHampton Roads community.

Given the complexities of being human—the inwardskirmishes with self and the more visible conflictswith the world we inhabit—it is easy to think of

one’s own odd sensibility as rooted in some kind ofperverse misunderstanding. This can result in a life definedby an apologetic silence. We turn to literature for threethings: clarification, affirmation and courage. The authorswho dare to challenge the given script, who ask vitalquestions and make bold assertions, give us a newchance to live, an opportunity to revise ourselves.

Their words are not simply entertaining; their words haveteeth. Through precise utterance and expansiveimagination, their words give us the means to cut throughthe filmy stupor that pervades our daily lives. It is aliterature that nudges, maybe knocks us, fromcomplacency. It seems that this power marks the best ofliterary endeavor.

The writers and artists of Old Dominion University’s 35thAnnual Literary Festival, through fiction, poetry, memoir,visual media, music and essay, will offer an opportunity fora more electric wakefulness. Poet Sean ThomasDougherty has said, “How can we wake up if the wordsdon’t bite us—hard—sometimes?”

We hope this year’s lineup of world-renowned authorsand artists will offer a refreshing sense of what words andother forms of expression can do.

John McManus and Tim Seibles2012 Festival Directors

M.T. Anderson has written stories for adults, picture books forchildren, adventure novels for young readers, and several

books for older readers (both teens and adults). His satirical bookFeed was a finalist for the National Book Award and was the winnerof the L.A. Times Book Prize. The first volume of his Octavian Nothingsaga won the National Book Award and the Boston Globe/HornBook Prize. He writes: “I love writing for younger readers. I love theirpassion. I love their commitment to stories. I love the way their headsare exploding with all the things they want to say and do.”

Robin Becker, liberal arts research professor of English andwomen’s studies at Penn State, has received fellowships from

the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the National Endowment for theArts, and the Bunting Institute at Harvard. Her published collections inthe Pitt Poetry Series include Giacometti’s Dog, All-American Girl,The Horse Fair, and Domain of Perfect Affection. Becker serves ascontributing and poetry editor for the Women’s Review of Bookswhere her column “Field Notes” appears regularly. During the 2010-11 academic year, Becker served as the Penn State Laureate.

Dustin Lance Black is a screenwriter, producer, director andsocial activist, having won the Academy Award and two

WGA Awards for Best Original Screenplay for “Milk,” the biopic ofthe late civil rights activist Harvey Milk. He is also a founder of theAmerican Foundation for Equal Rights which, with lawyers DavidBoies and Ted Olson, is leading the federal case against CaliforniaProposition 8, which eliminates rights of same-sex couples to marry.In 2012 Black merged his passions with “8,” a new play based onthe federal Prop 8 trial. Black’s Los Angeles cast included GeorgeClooney, Brad Pitt, Martin Sheen, Kevin Bacon and John C. Reilly.The play was broadcast live and continues to break viewershiprecords online. Hundreds of original productions are now scheduledacross the United States.

Sean Thomas Dougherty is an “underground/sound.” Known forhis electrifying performances, Dougherty was raised in a

politically radical, interracial family by an African-Americanstepfather and a mother of Eastern-European Jewish descent. Heis the author or editor of 12 books across genre including theforthcoming All I Ask for Is Longing (2014) and Sasha Sings theLaundry on the Line (2010). He has received two PennsylvaniaCouncil for the Arts Fellowships in Poetry and a FulbrightLectureship to the Balkans. He currently works at a pool hall andteaches creative writing part-time at Cleveland State University.Dougherty argues that the art of poetry is the language ofpeace. As he says, “Poetry is the opposite of barbed wire.”

Merle Feld is a writer of essays, plays and poems. Active inJewish feminism from its early years, Feld did not perceive

herself as a political person until 1989, when she spent asabbatical in Israel with her family. During that year, she becameinvolved in peace activism, facilitating an all-women Israeli-Palestinian dialogue group and demonstrating in an Israeliwomen’s weekly, silent protest of the Occupation. Theseexperiences formed the basis of her play “Across the Jordan,”included in the first anthology of Jewish women playwrights,Making a Scene (1997), and a chapter of her memoir, A SpiritualLife: A Jewish Feminist Journey (2007). Her most recent book isFinding Words (2011).

Jan Freeman is the author of Hyena, Autumn Sequence, andSimon Says, which was nominated for the National Book Critics

Circle Award in poetry. Her poems have been published innumerous journals and several anthologies. She co-edited theacclaimed Sisters: An Anthology (2009). Freeman founded ParisPress in 1995 in order to bring into print Muriel Rukeyser’s The Lifeof Poetry. She has been its director and publisher since. Paris Presseducates the public about groundbreaking yet overlookedliterature by women. The Press has also championed the work ofVirginia Woolf, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ruth Stone and literatureby numerous other women writers of the 19th, 20th, and 21stcenturies.

Words withTEETH

35th Annual Literary Festival

S e p t . 3 0 – O c t . 5 , 2 0 1 2

Sunday, September 30 3:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.Reception for “Woman, Image and Art”and “Photographs with Teeth,” a photogra-phy exhibit with work by Yunghi Kim, CoriPepelnjak, Karolina Karlic and Greta Pratt.Baron and Ellin Gordon Art Galleries

Monday, October 1 2:30 p.m.Yunte HuangChandler Recital Hall, Diehn Fine and Performing Arts

4:00 p.m.Yona HarveyChandler Recital Hall, Diehn Fine and Performing Arts

7:30 p.m.Robin Becker1012 Batten Arts and Letters Building

Tuesday, October 2 12:30 p.m.Sheri Reynolds1012 Batten Arts and Letters Building

2:30 p.m.Patrick RosalLearning Commons @ Perry Library, First Floor

7:30 p.m.Dustin Lance BlackNorth Cafeteria, Webb University Center

Wednesday, October 3 12:30 p.m.Karolina KarlicBaron and Ellin Gordon Art Galleries

2:30 p.m.Sean Thomas DoughertyChandler Recital Hall, Diehn Fine and Performing Arts

4:00 p.m.Dorianne LauxChandler Recital Hall, Diehn Fine and Performing Arts

7:30 p.m.M.T. AndersonChandler Recital Hall, Diehn Fine and Performing Arts

Thursday, October 4 12:30 p.m.Jan FreemanVirginia Beach Higher Education Center, Room 244A-B

5:30 p.m.Jamal MohamedChandler Recital Hall, Diehn Fine and Performing Arts

7:30 p.m.Merle FeldChandler Recital Hall, Diehn Fine and Performing Arts

Friday, October 5 2:30 p.m.Tim SeiblesChandler Recital Hall, Diehn Fine and Performing Arts

4:00 p.m.Alice RandallChandler Recital Hall, Diehn Fine and Performing Arts

8:00 PMAllan GurganusChandler Recital Hall, Diehn Fine and Performing Arts

OngoingWednesday – Friday, Oct. 3 – 5ODU Out and the ODU Theatre Departmentpresent Dustin Lance Black’s “8”Directed by Ricardo Melendez and producedby ODU Out and the ODU Theatre DepartmentOld Dominion University Theatre

Performances at 8 p.m. Oct. 3, 4 and 5, andmatinee shows at 12:30 p.m. Oct. 3 and 4

September 15 – October 14Photographs With TeethBaron and Ellin Gordon Art Galleries

Poet Sean Thomas Dougherty has said, “How canwe wake up if the words don’t bite us—hard—sometimes?” The same is true for photographs.“Photographs With Teeth” brings together worksby Yunghi Kim, Cori Pepelnjak, Karolina Karlic andGreta Pratt. These internationally recognized pho-tographers explore the working class, the 99 Per-cent, socioeconomic inequity and the costumingof patriotism.

Kim’s photographs of the Occupy Wall Streetmovement garnered a World Press Award and Pepelnjak’s series “By the Week” documents individuals who live in motels by the week. “TheDee” (slang for Detroit) series, by Guggenheim fel-low Karlic, uses vacant automobile factories andsingle-family homes stalled in construction stand-ing silently as metaphors for economic crisis andits effect on a community. Pratt’s “Liberty Wavers”brings together the issues of labor and the rhetoricof patriotism. Taking place on the eve of the Presi-dential election, this exhibition creates a timelyconversation about contemporary America.

Venue LocationsChandler Recital Hall, in the F. Ludwig DiehnFine and Performing Arts Center, corner of49th Street and Elkhorn Avenue

The Baron and Ellin Gordon Art Galleries,4509 Monarch Way, between 45th and 46th streets

Batten Arts and Letters Building, 43rd Streetand Hampton Boulevard

Webb University Center, 49th Street andBluestone Avenue

University Theatre, 4600 Hampton Boulevard,between 46th and 47th streets

Learning Commons @ Perry Library, 4427 Hampton Boulevard

Virginia Beach Higher Education Center,1881 University Drive, Virginia Beach

Garage parking is free for all festival events.For more information, please contact theEnglish department’s Creative Writing Officeat 757-683-3929.

For directions, please visithttp://www.odu.edu/oduhome/campusmap.shtml.

Schedule of Events

Author Bios